Exploring the cross-national variation in public support for climate policies in Europe: The role of quality of government and trust

To reach ambitious climate change mitigation targets and steer actors toward more climate friendly behaviors, governments will have to implement climate policy measures. Imposing certain policy instruments may be challenging since gaining public support for climate policies may be difficult in some countries, especially given the low levels of political trust we see in Europe and elsewhere in the world today. We argue that contextual factors, specifically, institutional quality matters. Using data from the European Social Survey (2016), we explore whether cross-national variation in public support for climate policies is associated with levels of quality of government (QoG) and trust in political institutions and people in general, and if such associations vary across different types of climate policies, including taxes, subsidies, and bans. We find that QoG and generalized trust are positively linked to support for taxes, but not to support for subsidies and bans. Moreover, we find that political trust is more strongly linked to support for taxes than to support for subsidies and bans. These results hold using alternative model specifications.